A Stricter Canon: General Luce Models for Arbitrary Menu Sets
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The classical Luce model (Luce, 1959) assumes positivity of random choice: each available alternative is chosen with strictly positive probability. The model is characterised by Luce’s choice axiom. Ahumada and Ulk¨u (2018) and (indepen- ¨ dently) Echenique and Saito (2019) define the general Luce model (GLM), which relaxes the positivity assumption, and show that it is characterised by a cyclical independence (CI) axiom. Cerreia-Vioglio et al. (2021) subsequently proved that the choice axiom characterises an important special case of the GLM in which a rational choice function (i.e., one that may be rationalised by a weak order) first selects the acceptable alternatives from the given menu, with any residual indifference resolved randomly in Luce fashion. The choice axiom is thus revealed as a fundamental “canon of probabilistic rationality”. This result assumes that choice behaviour is specified for all non-empty, finite menus that can be constructed from a given universe, X, of alternatives. We relax this assumption by allowing choice behaviour to be specified for an arbitrary collection of non-empty, finite menus. In this context, we show that the Cerreia-Vioglio et al. (2021) result obtains when the choice axiom is replaced with a mild strengthening of CI. The latter condition implies the choice axiom, thus providing a “stricter canon”.